The present invention relates to a method far scheduling terminals in a radio communication network.
Common scheduling in radio communication networks consists is defining distinct resources which may be for example separated in frequency, time or code and allocated to terminal knowing that two terminals in a predefined area will not be allocated the same resource in order to avoid interference.
In recent radio communication network, and especially in order to increase their throughput and efficiency, methods have been proposed which enables it to schedule more than one terminal in a predefined area on a single resource at the same time. The main issue consists in selecting appropriately the terminals to which identical resources can be allocated in order to limit the mutual interference caused in the system by the terminals using the same resources simultaneously. Especially in multi-cellular deployments with frequency reuse 1, strong interference is experienced at the cell borders. This interference can be reduced by coordinating the transmission in sectors which are close to each other. Criteria for selecting terminals which can be scheduled on the same resources take for example into account the position of the terminals in the cell and the possibility to generate separate beams using beamforming algorithms of multiple antennas base stations. More generally, only transmissions from/to terminals that result in a low mutual interference are scheduled on the same resource in neighboring sectors.
Scheduling algorithms with centralized coordination exists but have the disadvantage to require a high amount of signaling between the central entity and the base stations which need to be coordinated. Especially the whole channel conditions between the terminals and the base stations need to be forwarded to the central entity, the whole BS scheduling requests need to be forwarded to the central entity. Moreover the scheduling delay may be high.
A particular object of the present invention is to provide a scheduling algorithm showing to be more efficient with reduced signaling compared to the centralized option.
Another object of the invention is to provide a base station adapted to perform the scheduling method.